Hey everyone, just a quick heads-up. Some of you may have read about a memory leak that cropped up very late in Ubuntu 10.04 development process. They kindly put this phrase in their explanation of the bug:
"One possible solution is to roll back the GLX 1.4 enablement patches, and the patch which caused the memory leak to appear. These GLX patches were produced by RedHat and incorporated into Debian, they were not brought in due to Ubuntu-specific requirements"
which can obviously create the impression that the patches in question actually come from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or from Fedora.
Short story for the impatient: the problematic patch is not in any version of Fedora and never has been, Fedora is not subject to this memory leak and never has been.
So if you see any stories drawing the implication that Fedora is also subject to this leak, please feel free to correct them - it isn't.
Longer version for the curious: I'm not sure about the claim that the 'GLX 1.4 enablement patches' come from Red Hat, they may be in RHEL for some reason, but they're not in Fedora; we wouldn't need to backport GLX 1.4 from X server 1.8 to 1.7 as we're just shipping X server 1.8 in Fedora 13 anyway.
Regardless, the actual patch that caused the problem in Ubuntu was not part of the GLX 1.4 backport, but was an attempt to fix this bug:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26394
Sometimes X would crash when Clutter-based apps closed. Fedora did actually suffer from this bug too:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=579756
However, Ubuntu and Fedora took different approaches to fixing it. Ubuntu seems to have jumped on one of Jesse Barnes' early attempts to fix the problem (Jesse works for RH, hence the Red Hat link). In the end, though, if you read the upstream bug, Jesse ceded to Kristian Høgsberg (who, for the record, works for Intel), who provided a better fix which was committed to upstream. For Fedora 13, we took Kristian's fix, not any of Jesse's attempts. This was included in xorg-x11-server-1.8.0-7.fc13 . That seems to have caused a couple of problems with compositing managers:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=584832 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=577142
-7 was sent as a candidate update for F13, got bad Bodhi feedback (as you'd expect) and was withdrawn; it never went into the 'stable' F13 repo (the one from which the final F13 will actually be built). The bugs were fixed by adding one more upstream patch, from Michel Dänzer:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/xorg-x11-server/F-13/xserver-1.8.0-...
to xorg-x11-server-1.8.0-8.fc13 . That build has good feedback:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/xorg-x11-server-1.8.0-8.fc13
and was pushed to F13 updates two days ago. So in summary our processes worked very well, we didn't jump on an incomplete fix, we didn't push the initial upstream fix to the 'stable' F13 because our feedback system made us aware of the problems it caused, we did push the fully-working fixed package when it was confirmed ready, and we were never at any point subject to the memory leak issue. This is actually quite a nice story of our QA processes working effectively, if someone's looking for such a thing. =)
Press Release? 8)
On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 23:30 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
Hey everyone, just a quick heads-up. Some of you may have read about a memory leak that cropped up very late in Ubuntu 10.04 development process. They kindly put this phrase in their explanation of the bug:
"One possible solution is to roll back the GLX 1.4 enablement patches, and the patch which caused the memory leak to appear. These GLX patches were produced by RedHat and incorporated into Debian, they were not brought in due to Ubuntu-specific requirements"
which can obviously create the impression that the patches in question actually come from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or from Fedora.
Short story for the impatient: the problematic patch is not in any version of Fedora and never has been, Fedora is not subject to this memory leak and never has been.
So if you see any stories drawing the implication that Fedora is also subject to this leak, please feel free to correct them - it isn't.
Longer version for the curious: I'm not sure about the claim that the 'GLX 1.4 enablement patches' come from Red Hat, they may be in RHEL for some reason, but they're not in Fedora; we wouldn't need to backport GLX 1.4 from X server 1.8 to 1.7 as we're just shipping X server 1.8 in Fedora 13 anyway.
Regardless, the actual patch that caused the problem in Ubuntu was not part of the GLX 1.4 backport, but was an attempt to fix this bug:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26394
Sometimes X would crash when Clutter-based apps closed. Fedora did actually suffer from this bug too:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=579756
However, Ubuntu and Fedora took different approaches to fixing it. Ubuntu seems to have jumped on one of Jesse Barnes' early attempts to fix the problem (Jesse works for RH, hence the Red Hat link). In the end, though, if you read the upstream bug, Jesse ceded to Kristian Høgsberg (who, for the record, works for Intel), who provided a better fix which was committed to upstream. For Fedora 13, we took Kristian's fix, not any of Jesse's attempts. This was included in xorg-x11-server-1.8.0-7.fc13 . That seems to have caused a couple of problems with compositing managers:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=584832 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=577142
-7 was sent as a candidate update for F13, got bad Bodhi feedback (as you'd expect) and was withdrawn; it never went into the 'stable' F13 repo (the one from which the final F13 will actually be built). The bugs were fixed by adding one more upstream patch, from Michel Dänzer:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/xorg-x11-server/F-13/xserver-1.8.0-...
to xorg-x11-server-1.8.0-8.fc13 . That build has good feedback:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/xorg-x11-server-1.8.0-8.fc13
and was pushed to F13 updates two days ago. So in summary our processes worked very well, we didn't jump on an incomplete fix, we didn't push the initial upstream fix to the 'stable' F13 because our feedback system made us aware of the problems it caused, we did push the fully-working fixed package when it was confirmed ready, and we were never at any point subject to the memory leak issue. This is actually quite a nice story of our QA processes working effectively, if someone's looking for such a thing. =) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net
-- marketing mailing list marketing@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 23:38 +0100, Nelson Marques wrote:
Press Release? 8)
I'm not sure if it's worth that; so far I haven't seen any story which actually comes out and claims the bug is in Fedora. I just wanted to provide an explanation in case it comes up. There was one comment on a fairly obscure news article - http://techie-buzz.com/foss/ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx-hit-by-major-memory-leak... - which claimed Fedora was affected, but that's all.
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
I'm not sure if it's worth that; so far I haven't seen any story which actually comes out and claims the bug is in Fedora. I just wanted to provide an explanation in case it comes up. There was one comment on a fairly obscure news article - http://techie-buzz.com/foss/ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx-hit-by-major-memory-leak... - which claimed Fedora was affected, but that's all.
Blame me for that obscure blog.
Hopeful this all blows over and the notoriety that the Ubuntu big has gotten in the last few days doesn't morph into some sort of "common knowledge" that Red Hat/Fedora has this bug and Ubuntu ended up catching it and we didn't. The wording of the launchpad ticket leaves a lot of room to make poor judgements about the pedigree of this particular patchset. As evidenced in the comments of that blog article.
phoronix I think is the oldest article I can find from April 21st and I think other blogs have picked it up from there and are rebroadcacsting it . Blogs being what they are, I really don't want to see the poor choice of wording in the Launchpad ticket get mischaracterized in an effort to sensationalize a story and drive blog readership at the expense of... reality.
And In case this ends up infesting back channel communications like blog comment areas, twitter or irc...any place where crowdsourced misinformation breeds and propagates... I do not want comments like the one in that blog to be repeated without having a rebuttal a quick google search away. Does it need to be a press release? No. It's not really appropriate to rub Debian or Ubuntu's noses in picking up an intermediate patchset and running with it. But having an easily searchable wiki page at hand for reference would be something nice to have...just in case I need to politely educate someone who chooses to make statements not supported by fact.
But I do like the QA story about how our testing repository worked to help iterate a solution inside our new pre-release branching workflow. That's a nice positive story. If we can tell it without referencing the problems others have had in this area, I think that would be a good positive affirmation for our QA team and the new workflow introduced in F13.
-jef
Good approach. If you allow me a quote:
"Before all else, be armed" - Nicollo Machiavelli
On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 15:49 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
I'm not sure if it's worth that; so far I haven't seen any story which actually comes out and claims the bug is in Fedora. I just wanted to provide an explanation in case it comes up. There was one comment on a fairly obscure news article - http://techie-buzz.com/foss/ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx-hit-by-major-memory-leak... - which claimed Fedora was affected, but that's all.
Blame me for that obscure blog.
Hopeful this all blows over and the notoriety that the Ubuntu big has gotten in the last few days doesn't morph into some sort of "common knowledge" that Red Hat/Fedora has this bug and Ubuntu ended up catching it and we didn't. The wording of the launchpad ticket leaves a lot of room to make poor judgements about the pedigree of this particular patchset. As evidenced in the comments of that blog article.
phoronix I think is the oldest article I can find from April 21st and I think other blogs have picked it up from there and are rebroadcacsting it . Blogs being what they are, I really don't want to see the poor choice of wording in the Launchpad ticket get mischaracterized in an effort to sensationalize a story and drive blog readership at the expense of... reality.
And In case this ends up infesting back channel communications like blog comment areas, twitter or irc...any place where crowdsourced misinformation breeds and propagates... I do not want comments like the one in that blog to be repeated without having a rebuttal a quick google search away. Does it need to be a press release? No. It's not really appropriate to rub Debian or Ubuntu's noses in picking up an intermediate patchset and running with it. But having an easily searchable wiki page at hand for reference would be something nice to have...just in case I need to politely educate someone who chooses to make statements not supported by fact.
But I do like the QA story about how our testing repository worked to help iterate a solution inside our new pre-release branching workflow. That's a nice positive story. If we can tell it without referencing the problems others have had in this area, I think that would be a good positive affirmation for our QA team and the new workflow introduced in F13.
-jef
On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 15:49 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
But I do like the QA story about how our testing repository worked to help iterate a solution inside our new pre-release branching workflow. That's a nice positive story. If we can tell it without referencing the problems others have had in this area, I think that would be a good positive affirmation for our QA team and the new workflow introduced in F13.
Sure, that'd be nice. Feel free to build on my blog. I hope it doesn't come across as too anti-Ubuntu, that wasn't a conscious intention of mine in writing it, I just wanted to emphasize that Ubuntu and Fedora chose different patches (and hence got different bugs) :). To give Ubuntu credit, they seem to have resolved their issue rapidly too, within their own process.
On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 23:30 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
However, Ubuntu and Fedora took different approaches to fixing it. Ubuntu seems to have jumped on one of Jesse Barnes' early attempts to fix the problem (Jesse works for RH, hence the Red Hat link). In the
Correction: Jesse in fact works for Intel. Apologies for the mistake. Thanks to Matthew Garrett for the correction.
On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 01:33 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 23:30 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
However, Ubuntu and Fedora took different approaches to fixing it. Ubuntu seems to have jumped on one of Jesse Barnes' early attempts to fix the problem (Jesse works for RH, hence the Red Hat link). In the
Correction: Jesse in fact works for Intel. Apologies for the mistake. Thanks to Matthew Garrett for the correction. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net
so who does Kristian Høgsberg work for? I have a blog post that needs correcting :)
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